TigerLaunch spotlights student entrepreneurs, awards over $60,000 in prizes

Viewing 2 comments...

• 1:08 p.m. on April 8th, 2013

  Posted by

  judging the judges

  The second round judges should really rethink whether they are qualified to judge an event like TigerLaunch.

  To any technical person, it is clear that WebReduce is for all practical purposes, unfeasible. The primary issue comes from the fact that mapreduce problems are bottlenecked by disk i/o, not CPU. When you're talking about terabyte-scale problems, the idea of pushing this data over the network and giving a heavy payload to users is just flat out backwards. Solutions such as Amazon EMR are much more practical than a distributed approach. Beyond this, the ethics of offloading 1MB+ payloads to users without their knowledge is very questionable, especially if the process is silent. Third, this make mapreduce a scheduling problem - what happens if a user closes their browser during the middle of a job? Do you suggest introducing redundancy into the scheduling? Have fun.

  TechRover is a great company, but not at all one that is in the spirit of TigerLaunch - the competition should be about giving companies that need resources some resources, not giving a successful company more recognition.

  3DTouch wowwed the judges with fake demos, but none of the important questions were asked. The sensor seemed to be some sort of resonant inductive coupling, but no indication as to sensor resolution or accuracy was given. With precision UIs, these are the things that matter - I really can't see this sensor outperforming camera based gesture control on any of the points they claimed. If I'm wrong, more power to them.

  As far as the social track, I felt that RRR was the idea with the least impact of the finalists. Sure, getting college students active in improving literacy seems like a great goal. It is completely unclear how recording audiobooks achieves this goal. The team claimed to be combating illiteracy, but partners directly with schools. These low income schools will not be able to afford the audiobook technology, so resources are high. The impact of an audiobook also seems significantly less than that of an actual human reading the book, and it is unclear why it is important that college students read. Beyond this, if the target is truly the illiterate American, targeting through schools seems a bit counterproductive.

  Report abusive comment for deletion
  
• 11:53 p.m. on April 8th, 2013

  Posted by

  @judging the judges

  Do you even go here?

  Report abusive comment for deletion